Youtube API Subscription.ContentDetails.TotalItemCount and NewItemCount are broken - youtube-api

I've been using the v3 Youtube API through C# recently, and have noticed that with the Subscriptions.List API, the TotalItemCount and NewItemCount in the ContentDetails property of the returned subscription seem to be incorrect.
TotalItemCount is always 0, and NewItemCount is unpredictable. I usually see it as 0, but sometimes it's 2 or 3 or whatnot. It's described in the API spec as "The number of new items in the subscription since its content was last read." However even if I query it multiple times the number stays the same, and doesn't seem tied to anything I can figure out.
You can try out the API here, you need to enable Oauth with the Youtube scope, pass part=contentDetails and set Mine to true.

Related

Formating the api url to return only the videoId. (And use minimal quota)

So I'm using Home Assistant to launch an automation that retrieves the newest videoId that a channel has uploaded, so I can use my google home to play it(on a Roku TV), works fine, I am working on creating an automation that also does a GET request but for now, I am using the home assistant rest sensor that updates by performing a GET after a set number of seconds, for some reason though there are only 3 sensors polled every minute or so it seems they use around 100-500 quota(hitting my quota of 10,000 after only a few hours or less), I'm not sure if this is a home assistant problem or if I am not using the api correctly(I only need the videoId), ill link my url below:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?key=API_KEY&part=id&order=date&maxResults=1
Expected 1-3 quota usage per GET, getting 100+ quota usage per GET.
Querying the Search Endpoint is more expensive than querying the PlaylistItems endpoint for the given user's uploads playlist. Depending on usage patterns, the default quotas may put rather tight limits on the number of calls an user is allowed to make on various endpoints of the API.
Adapting my answer to a different question, I suggest you to do the following instead: call PlaylistItems endpoint, passing to it as playlistId parameter the given channel's uploads playlist ID.
A given channel's uploads playlist ID is obtained upon querying the channel's own endpoint. The needed ID is to be found at .items.contentDetails.relatedPlaylists.uploads. Usually, an channel ID and its corresponding uploads playlist ID are related by s/^UC([0-9a-zA-Z_-]{22})$/UU\1/.
Note that you should query the Channels endpoint only once, then use the returned uploads playlist ID as many times as you need.
Also note that you may experiment using the fields parameter applied to your queries, as to get from the API partial resources only. However, I'm predicting that (I may well be wrong, since did not tested it) the cost of 3 points for querying PlaylistItems for its contentDetails object cannot be improved.
Here is a prototype URL:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems?key=APP_KEY&part=contentDetails&fields=items/contentDetails/videoId&maxResults=1&playlistId=PLAYLIST_ID

YouTube API v3 Search not returning all videos

I'm trying to retrieve all videos for a channel, and some are not being returned by the api. I cannot find anything in the spec that indicates why some would not be in the result set.
The call I'm making is:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?type=video&key=__key_here__&channelId=UCxS2lX7728bTnmK1t21bYlA&part=id,snippet&maxResults=50&order=title
[To test this you'll need your own api key]
The first page of results is missing at least one video. The one from 8-15-2018, titled I LEARNED HOW TO DO A NEW TRICK!, which is located here, is not in the result set, even though it falls within the date range, and the first 50 results.
Does anyone know if this is a known issue?
I have verified that if I add the q parameter, with the video id, it will retrieve it.
You may refer with this link.
The API call that you should make if you want to get the videos in a channel is a youtube.playlistItems.list() with the playlistId of the "uploads" playlist for the channel. (This usually stars with UU..., but that's an implementation detail that might change in the future.
Here's an example of the call in the API Explorer.
Getting the same data via a search operation isn't guaranteed to return everything; the search index isn't a replacement for the backend data that you can obtain via the youtube.playlistItems.list() call. It's very much the same point raised in this blog post (though the focus there is on v2).
To summarize, to get all the uploads from a channel, you need to get the items from the uploads playlist for the channel using playlistItems.list on that playlist's ID rather than calling search.list on the channel ID.

YouTube API "mostPopular" requests doesn't seem to give updated results

It seems that the YouTube API doesn't give updated results for mostPopular videos in my country since few days.
Example:
This request (https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet,contentDetails&chart=mostpopular&regionCode=FR) doesn't give me the same videos results than the ones displayed directly on YouTube for the French most popular channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmzy72gDEpfXoFV9Xdtd0DQ). It seems that the results of this request is not updated since the 1th of february. Results was real time updated before this.
Does someone know if something is wrong with my API request, or if there are some issues with the YouTube API at this moment?
There is nothing wrong with your request. This is a known issue with the YouTube API reported here for Saudi Arabia (but also applicable to multiple regions), and another related issue here with regard to content from France.
Your best bet would be to follow up with the YouTube team on one of those defects, or potentially (and dangerously) scrape the YouTube site for the correct results.
Problem seems to be solved since 13th of february (maybe someone from Google have seen my post..)
YouTube Channels and chart=mostPopular parameter data are separate data entities, aka you will get different results. They may be related but there is no guarantee you will get the same data. To get the data that you want you may need to query for channel itself and its videos.
I got this information from the thread #Jal linked, there was an update by matthewc...#google.com a few days ago:
The most popular channel for Saudia
Arabia and
the mostPopular chart parameter in the video.list
call
are separate and distinct entities. If you'd like to get the content
of the most popular channel for Saudia
Arabia
please use the Data API video.list call to list the videos with the
channel ID (in this case "UCWY-_j1MCth6yf24m58Bh_Q") by setting the
items/snippet/channelId parameter.
My current concern right now is that there is supposedly a way to get video information from the videos.list endpoint using a channelId, which does not seem the case in the API Explorer. I will update my answer once I figure out what this person meant exactly.

Trouble migrating from V2 to V3 of YouTube API - can't list uploads of a channel

First off, apologize to post this, I don't think it is a duplicate since I kept crawling YouTube API tagged questions since yesterday and I couldn't find a fix.
My Question is, Can I keep using V2 of YouTube API even if it is officially deprecated ? the reason why is because I have 2 issues I still couldn't find a fix for them in V3 and I already have them in V2 : listing a channel's last uploads and popular uploads.
For the last uploads, in V2 I use http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/youtube/uploads?prettyprint=true , while I add ?orderby=viewCount to list the popular ones. I couldn't find an alt in V3 [ Tough I tried https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&chart=mostPopular&forUsername={Username}&maxResults=5&key={key} but it keeps listing videos from a channel I visited yesterday even if I change the username, making me think there is problem with the link or my key, a server key by the way ]
Any ideas ?
Thanks a lot !
Rather than using the videos->list endpoint, you should instead use the search endpoint, like this:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?order=viewCount&part=snippet&channelId=UCuo5NTU3pmtPejmlzjCgwdw&maxResults=25&key={YOUR_API_KEY}
You can do order=date to have them ordered chronologically rather than by popularity if you'd rather. There are also a lot of other parameters you can use ... see https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list for more details.
If you don't know the channel IDs, but only the usernames, you'll have to have multiple calls ... a call to this endpoint:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=snippet&forUsername={username}&key={YOUR_API_KEY}
This will return a packet with the channel ID in it. If you'd like to avoid making multiple calls or storing the username/channelID on your own, you could do the video search with the 'q' parameter set to be the username. It often works but you can get extraneous channels that way.

About YouTube search list API V3

In my application, I have used youtube.search.list API v3 for searching whole videos included in specific channel.
Example:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&channelId=[CHANNEL_ID]&q=[KEYWORD]
'q' is parameter for search keyword.
In my case, I used only 'q=' without keyword because I'd like to search whole videos.
It's working well at least until yesterday(27.Aug). but now, the server response is always 'totalResults: 0'
Could you tell me whether it's temporary wrong operation or the policy about this API is changed?
You can test above problem in the below url :
http://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/youtube/v3/youtube.search.list?part=snippet
The issue has been reported to the gdata issues list five times in the last 24 hours or so. Regardless of whether it's deliberate or not, there's a lot of people concerned.
The first instance report:
https://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=6598

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